DVT DAYS 79 & 80

DAY 64 Tuesday.

It’s Tuesday and it is also yesterday, so my memory of it maybe a tad augmented. I definitely got up and I had breakfast, that I know. I also know I went to the shed and moved my art bag and easel to it. The challenge now is to open them and screw up the courage to create. That’s quite daunting but I shall take inspiration from Grayson Perry who, on his last show, unashamedly designed a tea towel, a cracking good  tea towel mind you, but a tea towel nether the less.

I must have done something else in the morning, in fact I think I planted some more cosmos in the front garden before settling down to my one to one with the Enabling Environment programme manager. This went well and I came away with a manageable number of task to do. Lunch and then a return to the garden where I potted up purple carrots, and other veg in grow containers. I cleared the raised bed in the front garden and then replanted it with tomato plants from the green house. By the time I had finished the green house was looking quite bare so it’s time to start the second wave.

Being tired and hungry I retreated to the house where I ate dinner and watched some TV till I could live with myself no longer. I had not achieved my 10, 000 steps or walked and that could not be allowed to stand. I change and I go and walk to end the day with a total number of steps over 15,000. Go me, back on track. I run a bath and lay in it listening to a book at bedtime and then to a “conversation” between two gay women comedians and a trans man about life and relationships. Two of them were in a relationship but it was tricky to work out who. I got bored at the point where they started to compare tricky mental health periods of their lives  and went to bed. I do not think I lack compassion or empathy (well perhaps empathy) but when I am tired, under house arrest for being ill and have things to do, frankly I don’t give a fuck, I am too busy staying alive.

DAY 65 Wednesday

Up with the lark, or the rather over weight and quite pedestrian Dodo and down for breakfast. I sit my arse on the sofa and check my e-mails and by some bizarre twist of bureaucracy end up there till almost gone 11 o’clock. I do in fairness to me manage to tick of all my tasks from yesterdays one to one, so I do feel quite please with myself. Then I head for the shed and write a letter to an old colleague in response to her letter of a few days ago. Like all my letters when completed and signed and sealed they are delivered to my Hogwarts Owl who then posts them for me, although I think she thinks that I only do it to get her out of the house. I bring in the bins, take photographs of a bees bum up a foxglove and get ready for an on line open forum.

I sit in the open forum and take the odd note but realise I am uncomfortable with it today, not sure why but it feels sticky and I am aware that I did not blog yesterday, always a nag in my head when I do that but I was in the bath late listening to that conversation. I wonder if it’s on podcast, whatever that is. Clearly time to go to the shed to write the blog and think about what pictures I am going to use.

In a moment of… recklessness I open up the art box and take out a small blank canvas and start to make marks on it. I am thinking colours, pallet knives and daubing as opposed to paint brush dibs and daps.

Before I get to the colour stage I take myself in doors to send a couple of e-mails and then I settle down to a long Teams call with a friend, an afternoon coffee. It makes such a difference to be able to see people when talking to them and to be able to do this as a normal conversation and not a work meeting is a delight. Being able to talk about the ordinary things is a relief and being able to talk through the experience of lockdown and in my case being cancered is extremely generative.

Post Teams call it is dinner, TV, walk and sorting out the last minute additions to the Sainsburys order, life must go on.